"The global landscape used to be a theater of various shadings -- sunlit fields and canyons of dark obscurity, trackless jungles, and misty Shangri-las. Now the whole world is like a cineplex when the lights have come on. Almost no place on the surface of the planet is really obscure anymore. Satellites watch it all...

"Travel writing is perishable. I find that when I'm reading a book of bygone travels I become irritated with curiosity about what the place is like today -- can you still swim in the river, as the writer did? Can you still eat the fish? Are the houses still roofed with thatch? This problem has...

"We all know that it's possible to drive from here to California and stay at more or less the same motel the entire way, in a landscape where certain elements never change. This might have been an interesting experience thirty years ago when it was still new. It might be an interesting experience is you...

"Traveling in Siberia a decade ago, I thought I was pretty much beyond the reach of checkability; in fact-checker shorthand, anything I wrote would be “O.A.,” which stands for “on author,” meaning “unverifiable by anything other than the author’s say-so.” I did not need to worry that any checker would visit where I had been,...